The three-story "tower" that stands on the property today and graces the wine label is actually a pigeonniere, or dovecote, built in 1625—and is not, as is commonly imagined, the tower that gave the estate its name.

The funerary vault, or Monumentum Liviae, contained the cremated remains of more than a thousand Roman slaves and freedmen, their ashes packed in row upon row of ollae burial jars stacked in tiny niches around the vault, like pigeonholes; hence the name columbarium, meaning “dovecote.”